Today, the B.C. government joined Indigenous leaders and representatives from environmental groups and the timber industry to announce the finalization of a 19-year effort to protect the Great Bear Rainforest, Canada’s spectacular coastal rainforest.

As a result of the new legislation, 85 per cent of the forest — the largest coastal temperate rainforest left on Earth — will be off limits to industrial logging, a total of 2.4 million hectares. The announcement, scheduled for 10 a.m. at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Vancouver, is hailed as “precedent-setting” for the future of conservation and sustainable forestry by non-profit environmental group Canopy.